Monitoring with Opsview

By Alan Wijntje

A practical and fast-paced guide that gives you all the information you need to get up and running with Opsview.This book is for anyone interested in using Opsview as a potential monitoring solution or for those who are already running Opsview Core and who would like to improve on their setup by exploring the features of Pro and Enterprise. Some working knowledge of monitoring and Linux is assumed, and it is recommended to have an Opsview system at hand while reading, allowing you to immediately try out the features discussed.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Packt Publishing
• Release date: Dec 13, 2013
• ISBN: 9781783284740

Book preview

Table of Contents

Monitoring with Opsview

Credits

About the Author

Acknowledgments

About the Reviewers

www.PacktPub.com

Support files, eBooks, discount offers and more

Why Subscribe?

Free Access for Packt account holders

Preface

What this book covers

What you need for this book

Who this book is for

Conventions

Reader feedback

Customer support

Errata

Piracy

Questions

1. Opsview Core Basics

Important concepts

Installing and configuring Opsview Core

Package-based installations

Prerequisites

Installing Opsview

Virtual appliance

On demand

Using the Opsview help system and contextual menus

Contextual menu

Opsview help system

Creating user accounts

Adding and assigning roles

Adding contacts

LDAP and Active Directory integration

Reloading

Summary

2. Basic Configuration

Configuring hosts, host groups, and host group hierarchy

Host groups

Host group hierarchy

Hosts

Host templates

Configuring service checks and service groups

Creating service checks

Active Plugin

SNMP polling

Passive

Using dependencies

Adding plugins to the system

Handling performance data

Creating and installing Opspacks

Summary

3. Advanced Configuration

Using exceptions

Creating and using keywords

Using keyword views

Creating and using host attributes

Using attributes to multiply service checks

Configuring notifications

Using shared notification profiles

Testing from the WebUI

Using the advanced host configuration

Monitoring multi-homed hosts

Using parenting for network outage detection

Automation with the REST API

Configuration

Informational objects

Wrapping up the REST API

Summary

4. Agents, Clouds, and Modules

Using agents

Adding plugins to the Linux agent

Adding plugins to the Windows agent

Agentless monitoring

SSH

SNMP and host interfaces

WMI

Virtualization and Cloud monitoring

Virtualization

Setting up vSphere monitoring

Cloud monitoring

Amazon AWS

Slicehost

Clouds on the horizon

Using core modules

NagVis

MRTG

NMIS

Summary

5. Opsview Mobile

Configuring Opsview for Opsview Mobile

Opsview Mobile on Android

Opsview Mobile on iOS

Using push notifications

Summary

6. The Three Ts

Using the tools from the utils directory

clone_host

copy_host_attributes

export_full_config

export_host_template

get_actual_command

list_unknown_devices

rename_host

test_notifications

nlcat

Testing plugins from the command line

Checking the various log files and debugging

Opsview log files

Opsviewd.log

import_ndologsd

import_perfdatarrd

Opsview-web.log

Debugging

Common agent issues

CHECK_NRPE: Error – Could not complete SSL handshake

NRPE: Command '' not defined

NRPE: Return code of 127 is out of bounds – plugin may be missing

NRPE: Return code of 255 is out of bounds

Summary

7. Designing a Monitoring Environment

Scaling

Deployments

Monitoring concepts

How to measure availability and performance

Dependencies

Thresholds

Keywords

Using notifications

Multi-homed environments

Network outages

Real path monitoring

Running your environment

Summary

8. Upgrading to Opsview Pro or Opsview Enterprise

Why upgrade?

Upgrading or fresh install

Dashboard

Prerequisites

Entitlement

Activating Opsview Pro or Enterprise

Adding additional entitlements

Summary

9. Opsview Pro Features

Autodiscovery

Firewalls

Network scan

VMware scan

SNMP traps

Configuration

SNMP trap service check

Exceptions

Rules

Matching

Multitenancy

Creating tenancies

Summary

10. Opsview Enterprise Features

Scalability

Opsview databases

Using remote databases

Distributed monitoring

Slaves

Creating a slave

Slave clusters

Service desk connectors

Installing the service desk connector

Connecting your Service Desk System

Reporting

Configuring reporting

Running reports

Types of reports

Availability

Events

Combined

Summary

11. Additional Modules

The multi-master module

The Network Analyzer module

The NetAudit module

The NetFlow module

Configuring NetFlow

Viewing NetFlow information

NetFlow and tenancy

Opsview Pro versus Opsview Enterprise

The Opsview Pro edition

The Opsview Enterprise edition

The Opsview MSP edition

Summary

12. Opsview Dashboards

Getting started with dashboards

Business dashboards

The Process Map dashlet

The keyword dashlets

The performance dashlets

Technical dashboards

The Network Map dashlet

The Metric Pie Chart dashlet

The host group dashlets

The event dashlets

The top services dashlets

The Note Pad and System Status dashlets

The NetFlow dashboard

Dashboard options

The automatically cycle option

The sharing option

Users and dashboards

Requirements

Technical dashboards

Business dashboards

The Process Map dashlet

Summary

Index

Monitoring with Opsview

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Monitoring with Opsview

Copyright © 2013 Packt Publishing

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embedded in critical articles or reviews.

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First published: December 2013

Production Reference: 1061213

Published by Packt Publishing Ltd.

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ISBN 978-1-78328-473-3

www.packtpub.com

Cover Image by Benoit Benedetti (<[e-mail]>)

Credits

Author

Alan Wijntje

Reviewers

Duncan Ferguson

Jesse A. Griffin

Surendra Mohan

Acquisition Editor

Rubal Kaur

Commissioning Editor

Mohammed Fahad

Technical Editors

Rahul U. Nair

Anita Nayak

Rohit Kumar Singh

Project Coordinator

Sageer Parkar

Proofreader

Maria Gould

Copy Editors

Alisha Aranha

Roshni Banerjee

Gladson Monteiro

Deepa Nambiar

Karuna Narayanan

Kirti Pai

Laxmi Subramanian

Indexer

Rekha Nair

Production Coordinator

Saiprasad Kadam

Cover Work

Saiprasad Kadam

About the Author

Alan Wijntje has been working in the IT field since 2000 when he started out as a simple technician providing local IT support to various companies.

Figuring out why something broke (and then fixing it) soon became his specialty, and he outgrew this job within a couple of years; his employer was quick to recognize this, and within days, he was given a new assignment to work on the NOC for a major Dutch ISP.

After settling in, Alan quickly started to get to grips with the various monitoring systems and was soon making various improvements.

His love for Linux was a great asset when he was granted more and more freedom to tinker with various systems, including Netcool OMNIbus and Nagios.

After three years (and a company merger), Alan moved to another department that was solely responsible for all monitoring systems (most notable were Netcool OMNIbus and Nagios), and he was put in charge of all Nagios-based systems.

Running a lot of separate Nagios systems was, however, a lot of work and soon plans were made to move to a more user-friendly, flexible, and scalable solution.

Opsview was introduced as the replacement, and the system was built in record time after which Alan spent most of his time writing new plugins, fixing plugins, thinking up new ways of tackling various monitoring requirements (such as using Selenium for web-based tests), and so on.

After about three years of being the Opsview administrator, Alan again moved his department to join one of the networking teams (his other passion) where he got to play around with data center switches, virtual switches, and firewalls.

Although, technically, he is no longer an Opsview administrator, he still loves to help out (sometimes a bit too much some would say), write plugins, and even spend lots of time on the Opsview forum and the #opsview IRC channel helping others out.

Alan has worked for the Dutch company, QNH, since he started in IT, and over the years, they have always been quick to recognize his interests and talents and have helped him develop these skills (even some he never knew he had).

Acknowledgments

Now I'm sure I'll forget to thank someone when I finish this, so I apologize for this beforehand.

I do know for sure I need to thank my girlfriend Karin, my family, and friends (especially Jurriaan for being my nerd buddy) for letting me off the hook whenever I had to cancel or postpone dates while writing this book.

A very big thank-you to the guys at Opsview and a special thank-you to Duncan, Neil, Ton, Rob, and Adnan for all their help and support over the years that I have been running/using/playing around with Opsview (and for listening to me whenever I have some weird and wild feature request or idea).

Of course the guys in my old monitoring team: Arjan, Frans, Job, and Robin for letting me build and be in charge of the Opsview environment and helping me out whenever I needed support.

A special thank-you must also go to Duncan, Jesse, and Surendra, who reviewed this book and did a fantastic job by keeping me on my toes and providing essential feedback and recommendations.

And last but not the least I would like to thank the people at QNH and specially my manager Ruud and our Qniversity manager Diana for supporting me on this endeavor and for always helping me out with whatever I needed.

About the Reviewers

Duncan Ferguson works at Opsview Limited and has been working with Opsview since early 2007. In this time, he has worked on feature design, development, and provided consultancy for the product. He is currently the Support Team Leader and acts as the third-line support for all issues, although he still acts in other capacities as required, including diving into the code to fix problems.

He looks after a number of freeware projects and Perl modules as well as authoring and maintaining ClusterSSH, a popular administration tool.

In what remains of his spare time, Duncan is a devoted father, husband, animal carer, scuba diver, and skier, although not all at the same time.

Jesse A. Griffin is a system administrator with experience in Linux, FreeBSD, and Windows. Day-to-day, he designs, implements, and maintains clusters, databases, e-mail systems, highly available storage, monitoring systems, websites, and performs all types of open source administration tasks for clients around the world.

When not working, he teaches Old Testament and the Hebrew language at his church. He also provides consulting services for several nonprofit and educational institutions.

I would like to thank tummy.com, ltd. for allowing me the time to review this book.

Surendra Mohan is currently serving as Drupal Consultant-cum-Drupal Architect at a well-known software consulting organization in India. Prior to joining this organization, he served a few Indian MNCs and a couple of startups in varied roles, such as Programmer, Technical Lead, Project Lead, Project Manager, Solution Architect, and Service Delivery Manager. He has around nine years of working experience in